Lots of web applications are making the leap to smaller, mobile devices these days. Following the recent news that you can now download the Wikipedia to your ipod, neomat is announcing a free service that optimizes flickr picture delivery to mobile phones. (There’s no charge for the neomat hub service, but obviously your cellular data charges will apply).

Now whenever a Flickr group you belong to has new content, you can receive the image resized for mobile phones along with any associated text. netomat hub members can also invite friends to their Flickr hub for group chat about the Flickr content. From the press release:

“We believe the next lucrative stage for digital photography vendors comes in the form of facilitating access to personal photos from anywhere at anytime on any device,” said Jill Aldort, senior consultant at InfoTrends. “Compatible photo sharing and messaging services, like netomat and Flickr, facilitate such a community by connecting consumers using tools like camera phones, instant messaging and web portals.”

A few weeks ago we were all chuckling about the Pherotone site put up by McKinney Silver, and wondering what they might be trying to promote with this apparently stealth marketing campaign (”Pherotones” supposedly being ringtones that had a pherenome-like affect). I never got a good answer about that, but bells went off in my head when I noticed this item about a new animated series developed exclusively for mobile phones that features porn star Jenna Jameson. Well, her voice anyway. I’m guessing that if anyone could make a ringtone that would get people all hot and bothered, it’s probably Jenna.

The show called “Samurai Love God” is an original animated mobile video series from Comedy Central. Featuring eight 2-1/2 minute episodes, the series will premiere this quarter across three cellular carriers, Verizon, Sprint Nextel and Amp’d.

As I write this, I am somewhere over the North Sea on my way back from Norway. I am flying SAS back to the US. SAS has equipped most of their long-haul fleet with inflight Internet service using Boeing’s new Connexion service.

I tested the service and am quite impressed. It is a big leap forward compared to the $4 per minute payphones on most US airlines. The Internet connection is relatively fast, more than adequate for web access, email, and VPN access.

I also put it through its paces with some VoIP calls via X-Ten, using several VoIP providers. I also used it to place some calls via Gizmo. Connexion is a satellite based service, so as I expected there is a noticeable time delay in voice calls, but overall performance and audio clarity was quite good. This was not a scientific test, but it worked, and worked better than I expected.

At $9.95/hour, or $26.95/flat rate per flight, it is not a bad deal. If you buy an hour or two of access, and spend most of that time on the phone, it works out to $0.10 to $0.15 per minute depending on the rate plan. Not a bad deal.

I know some people decry the arrival of telephone service on flights. I can sympathize with people who don’t want to be bothered with other people’s conversations, but at the same time a noisy jetliner is not exactly a tranquil place. I often find myself bored out of my mind on long flights, so I welcome the ability to chat or talk with people on the ground and/or get some useful work done.

NOTE: another nice bonus feature is live video. Connexion also offers several live TV feeds from CNBC, BBC World and a few other channels. I didn’t have a chance to test these, as they required Internet Exploder and Windows Media Player.

The Vonage company offered me a free account for use during the production and marketing of my book Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones. Since the book’s long finished and the radio interviews have pretty well stopped, I decided to get my own account and transfer my home office line from SBC/AT&T to Vonage.

Switching your number from one of the traditional telephone companies can almost always (about 99% success rate) be done, but I caution everyone to expect the switch to take at least two weeks. Readers tell me they’ve waited as long as a month for their switch.

My number transferred over within a week. In fact, I hadn’t even hooked up my new Vonage router in place of my old Vonage router when the switch occurred.

I did all that this morning. The Quick Start Guide did a good job showing how to use the Vonage router (a special Linksys model customized with phone plugs) by itself as your sole network router, and how to plug it into an existing router you planned to keep. Plugs and cables are color coded, making the process about as simple as plugging in a few cables and calling a Vonage 800 number to verify service activation.

If broadband phones don’t make huge jumps in market share, it won’t be because the degree of difficulty remains high. The Vonage installation experience was about as difficult as plugging a USB device into a modern computer: not difficult at all.

As I write this, I am in my hotel lobby in Oslo making Broadvoice calls using my Power Book. It works “ok”, but I have been so spoiled by other Apple products that I can’t help but wonder when they’ll embed a SIP phone in iChat. It just seems like such an obvious extension.

They already have a solid platform. It makes hooking up to virtually any network a no-brainer. It has Bluetooth. It has a solid underlying OS. It would be nice to click on a phone icon in my Phone Book and have that trigger a SIP call in iChat or iPhone or whatever they decide to call it.

If they were smart about it Apple could do for VoIP hardware and networking what Skype did for software, by turning every Mac into a ready-made VoIP terminal with minimal extra effort. If it’s there, people will use it, especially if its standards compliant and people can take their pick of inbound/outbound VoIP providers.

Adding a SIP phone to the package would be pretty easy to do, so I am kind of surprised that Apple hasn’t done this already. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that this is one of the “exciting” new products that they’ve been making noise about.

Russell Shaw over at BBHub and ZDNet has been providing some excellent coverage of the latest developments in the RIM-NTP court case.

Here’s a roundup:

• Russell’s prediction of an injunction with a 60 day delay
• Predictions from 8 industry experts (including yours truly)
• Russell’s one on one with Troy Wolverton of TheStreet.com, who’s convinced there will be an injunction
• Lessons learned from this whole mess

I spend a _lot_ of time on the phone, usually several thousand minutes per month, although this is spread across several different devices and accounts. I have a mobile line, a POTS line, VoIP service from Broadvoice, and an 800 number.

Recently my travel patterns changed, and as a result, I found that I was spending a lot more time on my cellular phone than I was aware of. A rude surprise in the form of a $500 phone bill awoke me to this fact. I normally don’t even bother to read my phone bills if they are more or less in line with what I expected to pay.

I am generally not a miser with phone service. Time is money, and if I am not being gouged, I don’t have time to call “customer service” over a few dollars. However, I don’t like getting clocked with “overage” charges from my mobile provider. I am currently with T-Mobile, and am quite happy with them overall. They provide a good mix of services at reasonable prices, provided you don’t go over your monthly allotment (if you do, additional minutes cost $0.40/minute, which is pretty steep, although this is the norm in the US for cellular airtime).

Much of the time I spend on my mobile phone is spent at other clients’ offices, coffee shops and the like. I am usually stationary at these locations, and can use wi-fi combined with my Broadvoice VoIP account and XTEN VoIP client to make phone calls. Since I spend a lot of time at airports and other locations with paid wifi hotspots, I signed up for T-Mobile’s $19.95/month hotspot plan.

At first $20/month for yet another internet access plan seemed steep, but then I realized that if I moved a fraction of my cell calls to wifi, it would pay for itself with only 50 minutes of usage per month (50 minutes times 40 cents/min). I figured, conservatively, I spend several hours per month in airport lounges, otherwise dead time that is perfect for returning phone calls. Within a month, my cellular use dropped back below my 1400 minute cap on daytime usage, saving me at least $200 per month relative to recent bills, and making my $20 month spend on T-Mobile wi-fi look like a bargain.

Voice over Wi-Fi is not a replacement for cellular, but if you are a heavy phone user and frequently use the phone in stationary settings like airports, this is a viable strategy for keeping your phone bills under control. It isn’t free, but if you pair wifi with a flat-rate VoIP plan such as Broadvoice’s Unlimited World plan, you can call pretty much anywhere in the developed world for a capped monthly rate.

This is why I think cellular providers will be smart to embrace dual mode cellular+WiFi devices. The ideal package will be something like this. $50 per month gets you unlimited domestic and international calling to select countries via SIP, combined with a mobile phone that can latch onto WiFi networks. Whoa? $50 per month sounds steep. Yes, but not really because that bundle would include: flat-rate VoIP service that would normally cost $20-30 per month separately, license for a SIP client on the mobile phone, and perhaps access to the mobile operators own network of WiFi hotspots. Bonus points if this also included the option to use PC based softphones with the same SIP login credentials.

This is a smart strategy for two reasons. First, it will enable the telco to offer power users an attractive product where they would otherwise be forced to look at other options. Second, it is the nail in the coffin for POTS lines. If my T-Mobile phone would work with my home Wi-Fi service, especially if I could have a wired SIP phone linked to the same account, I could finally get rid of my increasingly less useful POTS service. I got rid of SBC DSL several years ago (thank God), and now would like to give my POTS service the heave-ho.

Fixed-mobile convergence was a big theme at this year’s GSM expo, so the major carriers are clearly thinking about this. What remains to be seen is if any of them will launch a product that is truly innovative with aggressive pricing, or if they will botch this by coming out with an overly complicated, overpriced and not very attractive product (as they’ve done with streaming video).

Here’s something that’s great to see. RIM is putting on a contest called the BlackBerry Corporate Application Awards.

There are three categories, each category having three finalists:

• BlackBerry Browser Applications
• Java Applications for BlackBerry
• BlackBerry MDS Studio Applications

You’ll need to send your entry in by April 7th, 2006. The prizes look pretty sweet! First, second, and third place prizes all include a BlackBerry Enterprise Server software license ($3,000 value) and at least 2 BlackBerry devices of your choice. First place also includes an all expenses paid (except meals) trip to the annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium.

Developers, start your engines!

ZDNet’s Russell Shaw points to and agrees with Martin Geddes’ recent rant on the Skype Journal about the less-than-stellar quality of many SkypeOut calls. I must say that this has been my experience too — SkypeOut calls seem to often have poor audio quality, much poorer than Skype-to-Skype calls, but also worse than most PSTN calls I experience. Martin notes that his experiences are becoming too frequent to be just anecdotal and that he, like many of us, came to Skype not just for its value proposition but for the quality too.

I’m curious what kind of experiences others are having with SkypeOut. If you have an opinion on the audio quality of the SkypeOut service, please leave a comment here. Thanks!

Last week I set off to Barcelona for 3GSM. It is a huge event, with over 40,000 attendees and some 1,000 exhibitors. Despite its size, there was a notable lack of real breakthrough technologies (and almost no mention of VoIP, as it is a four letter word for most telcos). Lots of incremental improvements and new product releases, but nothing disruptive.

I did find a few really interesting companies, some of which I’ll write about in more detail soon. Among the more interesting things I saw at this year’s expo:

Best Handsets

Sony Walkman (W810, or W900)

This is the best music phone I have seen to date. It is a very well designed cellphone, works on a variety of networks and supports 3G data speeds (W900). One of the things I liked most is that they did a lot of design work on the user interface, which sports some really nice iconography. Most cellphones usually have a hideous UI hiding inside a nice shell. Sony got this one right. Prediction for 2006… I wouldn’t be surprised if the Walkman brand makes a comeback. The only major flaw, the phone requires a proprietary headset and does not support Bluetooth stereo.

Samsung (Multiple Models)

I was quite impressed with Samsung’s handsets. No single device stood out, but overall they have done a lot of work to support the latest high-speed data, camera and mobile video technologies, and have produced some nicely designed phones. They did an especially good job incorporating new mobile video systems, such as DVB-H and MediaFLO, into their handsets. Samsung has devices for virtually every combination of cellular network and feature set, not a small feat considering the variety of technologies being rolled out. Watch for an article especially about Samsung’s newest devices later this week.

Best Headset

Motorola Mini Blue

Motorola’s Mini Blue is a Bluetooth earpiece. It reminds me a lot of the Jabra earpiece, first released about 10 years ago, except sans cords. It is tiny, has no boom mic, and looks like something out of a sci-fi flick. The mini-blue is due out in a few months. I expect this will be a big seller.

Best Access Technology

4G Systems - XSCard C3

4G Systems has made a PC card that supports multiple high-speed mobile networks, including HSPDA, UMTS, EDGE and basic GPRS. This enables mobile users to access data networks at speeds ranging from basic GPRS speeds (~50-150kbps) to megabit speeds. Overall, a great solution for mobilizing laptop and tablet computers.

Best Crossover Technology

Snell & Wilcox

Snell & Wilcox demoed a very impressed mobile video compression suite. S&W has years of experience providing video compression technology to broadcasters. They are applying this expertise to create smart video compression tools that maximize video quality, even on slow 64-128kbps wireless links.

They were not demoing yet another compression format, but rather what they do is a lot of pre-processing and optimization with existing formats. A good analogy to use are DVDs. Although they all use the MPEG2 format, you can tell the difference between a DVD producer who used a high-end compression shop versus one who used an off-the-shelf tool. S&W are experts in optimizing the compression process, and are applying this to mobile video.

They will be offering a suite of tools to mobile content producers and broadcasters that will enable them to increase the quality of their feeds.

Cable giant Comcast promises to add 1 million new phone subscribers, in this story. How will they do this?

Comcast and other cable carriers will take over the lead in consumer VoIP in the US because they are aggressively bundling their new phone services to upsell existing customers of TV and Internet access services. Although cable company broadband phone pricing is always higher than competitors like Vonage ($35-$40 pre month versus $20-$25), they offer bundled convenience with discounts bringing down the phone costs to about the same level as Vonage.

Statistics show bundled customers stay put, reducing customer churn by amazing amounts. As the current administration continues to support big business over consumers, regulations will continue to wither and choice will continue to disappear.

Amazingly, short-sighted investors on Wall Street cut Comcast’s stock price because they’ll spend money getting 1 million new phone subscribers this year. Does market share mean nothing anymore?

After meeting multiple Vonage employees during my research for my consumer VoIP book, I feel I have a decent grasp on the company culture. That culture strongly echoes Jeffrey Citron, the now ex-CEO and new Chairman and Chief Strategist. Make no mistake – Citron is a sales guy, a high-end sales guy who collects large sums of money wherever he goes. The move from CEO was a bone thrown to the SEC for restrictions placed on Citron from an earlier company (Citron paid a $22.5 million dollar fine but admitted no wrong doing). Call him by whatever title you want, but he will continue to be a sales guy.

I expected Vonage to be sold or go public this year, because they’ve already burned through $600 million in venture capital funding, and investors want some return. Frankly, I expected someone to buy Vonage, but I bet the growth in phone service from cable companies scared off buyers. Read about the IPO here.

Leading the market now with about 1.4 million subscribers, Vonage faces strong growth pressure from cable companies bundling phone service with TV and Internet access. There’s always a chance the FCC will allow cable companies to “shape traffic” to support their own services, which will degrade the service of companies like Vonage that don’t have their own networks. Look for more lawyers to start making even more money, much of it from lobbyists, over the next two years.

Vonage proved the market for telephone-centric consumer VoIP existed, and they retain leadership of that market. But Super Bowl ads are an expensive way to get new customers, and the IPO will supposedly go mostly to marketing. So it appears Vonage has not changed their tactics over the past few years. This means the changing market may cause them more trouble than they expect.

Metrix Pebble is a variant of the popular Pebble Linux distribution that adds a web-based configuration GUI, support for OLSRD and EVDO, automatic generation of network flows, wireless users, and radio link status graphs using rrdtool, and all fits in just under 64MB of flash memory. In this new article, Rob Flickenger describes how to use Metrix Pebble to set up a wireless mesh network.

I had the pleasure of working with Rob at O’Reilly a couple of years ago, and he really knows his stuff. He blew just about everyone away with his Pringles can WiFi antenna (his weblog entry about that project is the most most popular O’Reilly Network weblog post ever with nearly 2 million page views!). Rob is the author of the highly-acclaimed Building Wireless Community Networks and co-author of the second edition of Wireless Hacks. If you’re interested in wireless mesh networking, check out what Rob is up to. You’ll be glad you did.

I continue to be very impressed with Dan York and Jonathan Zar’s Blue Box VoIP security podcasts. Dan’s latest blog entry details some of their most recent shows, including a few special edition podcasts from our recent ETel conference. I especially liked Brad Templeton’s talk from ETel where his “evil twin” gave a sarcastic (and hilarious) talk to a fictional ILEC conference about the CALEA wire-tapping act. They’ve also got Phil Zimmerman’s ETel talk and an interview with Asterisk’s Mark Spencer and Ranch Network’s Alex Pavlovsky. If you’re working in VoIP security or just interested in staying on top of the current VoIP issues, you’ll definitely want to subscribe to Blue Box.

Next week, I’ll be heading off to 3GSM in Barcelona. This year there are over 40,000 attendees and nearly 1000 exhibitors selling anything and everything related to mobile telephony. I’ll be canvasing the show floor in search interesting gems. I’ll also be taking my brand new tri-band 1973 GSM Port-O-Rotary (courtesy of Spark Fun Electronics). I can’t think of a better venue to show off a rotary cell phone than 3GSM.

I’ll be writing about the expo, and if I can get a clean VoIP connection, I may also conduct some live interviews from the show floor using a combination of cellular, VoIP and conferencing tools.

PS - if you have any tips for must-see products or services, please send me an email.

BEA’s dev2dev site has published a detailed technical introduction to SIP by Emmanuel Proulx that nicely covers the inner workings of the SIP protocol. In this introduction to a multi-part series of SIP articles, Proulx discusses the reasons that SIP has become so significant and disects a SIP call to delve into the details about the various SIP messages and their uses.

I just heard that Tim O’Reilly will be speaking at Jeff Pulver’s upcoming Spring VON conference. Tim will be giving an industry perspective talk on Wednesday, March 15th. If you can’t make it I’ll be blogging from the show, but I’d highly reccomend trying to catch his talk — Tim’s a great speaker with his finger on the pulse of emerging trends and technologies.

I was happy to hear that iotum impressed at Demo this year, so much so that they were chosen as one of the ten “Demo Gods” of the show. That’s quite an accomplishment and I expect it will mean the good folks at iotum will receive a lot more attention (and funding) in the near future. I met iotum co-founder Alec Saunders at ETel and saw a demo of their powerful relevance engine, and I’m not at all surprised this technology wowed the crowd at Demo. It’s powerful stuff. And I also agree with Andy Abramson, it couldn’t happen to nicer people.

For their Demo launch, iotum just released a new feature called Pronto conferencing to their platform around conference calling which makes a lot of sense. Since the system already knows about it’s customer’s various phone numbers and schedules, why not let it ease the task of getting people together on conference calls? I’d sure love to never have to scramble for that always-elusive conference call access code again.

Jon Arnold has a good post today on iotum’s Demo success, with more links for those interested. Congratulations Alec and Howard!

Makezine is pointing to a great HOW-TO on configuring the Sipura SPA3000 with VoIPStunt for free calling by Chris Järnåker.

So what more can this little box do? You can basically set any existing VoIP parameter that exists in the SPA3000. I mean - you have hundreds of parameters you can change to make it work together with for example a Asterisk server (the Linux PBX). You can set it up so that you can call from your cell phone to your local landline (the Sipura’s line in) and it will route your call out over VoIP, and this means that you can call international from your cell phone with local rates. Neat huh? You can have it route calls to lets say France over your landline but calls to Germany over VoIP, or it can hold your telephone book so that you can press a short code for a long telephone number.

Related link: http://www.skylab-mobilesystems.com/en/products/spot_bb.html

Spot for BlackBerry is a great application and it just got a lot better. Previously, Spot for BlackBerry has been limited to devices with a builtin GPS, which currently limits you to the 7250 or the 7100i.

The newest release of Spot can now use external Bluetooth GPS adapters, such as the Garmin GPS 10, or the Holux Bluetooth GPS device. This lets you use a GPS with any BlackBerry that supports Bluetooth.

This lets you get the best of both worlds - you can use a BlackBerry that doesn’t eat your battery alive (has always been a problem with the 7520 and the 7100i) and get GPS functionality.

The BlackBerry and GPS marraige is inevitable. I think we’ll continue to see tighter and tighter integration with location based services for the BlackBerry. The unlimited data connection that the BlackBerry provides is simply too enticing for GPS developers.

Putting an end to the seemingly endless speculation, Vonage has filed for its IPO today. For all the financial details, check out the SEC documents. Vonage generated some serious revenue in the first 9 months of 2005 ($167.3 million), but as IP Democracy notes they also had steep losses during that same timeframe ($189.6 million). Along with the IPO filing, Vonage has also announced that Jeffery Citron will step down as CEO, and Michael Snyder will come on board as the new CEO. Andy Abramson points out that the $250 million IPO filing is a lot smaller than many observers were expecting.

The traditional PSTN is a complex creature, but it must be understood in order to successfully integrate with VoIP. Sean Walberg walks us through the world of traditional telephony, identifying the key terms, concepts, and acronyms along the way. You may have noticed that the field of telecommunication is really big on acronyms, and if you’ve ever wondered what a DS0, an FXS, or a DID is, Sean’s Telecom Terms and Concepts article is for you. If you believe the cliche that you have to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going, you’ll want to bookmark this clear, concise reference to basic telephony.

Today the Senate Commerce Committee is holding hearings on Net Neutrality, which are being webcast for interested parties. If you care about the efforts currently underway by the incumbent telcos and cable companies to create a tiered Internet and establish a “fast lane” on the net to be reserved for their own services or services from large content providers willing and able to pay access fees to the carriers for a higher quality of service, now is the time to pay attention and get involved.

Verizon continues to set the stage for a big showdown around Net Neutrality this year, as senior vice president John Thorne is quoted today in the Washington Post telling Google that their “free lunch” on the carrier’s tab must come to an end:

“The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”

Cynthia Brumfield over on IP Democracy (my new favorite site) has been following this issue closely and as expected has an astute analysis of the latest developments. She’s been taking both sides to task for their ratched-up rhetoric lately, and today Verizon gets her attention:

Why should Google’s “lunch” be yours when they created something that in your wildest dreams Verizon could never have developed? It took a whole lot more than “cheap servers” to do what Google has done. And they did so at a time when the idea of a free, open and unhindered Internet seemed like an unalterable reality, even to the telcos.

Daniel Steinberg interviewed me after the Emerging Telephony conference for his latest Distributing the Future podcast. If you haven’t listened to Daniel’s podcasts before, I highly reccomend them. His weekly DTF technology show is the one podcast I look forward to, there’s always something new to discover or that I’ve been dying to know more about. I’m proud that I had some involvement in getting this podcast off the ground at O’Reilly and I have no doubt we’ll be hearing a lot more from Daniel in the future.

Probably the most interesting story in VoIP coming out of this weekend is the over $21 million in funding that FON just secured from the likes of Google, Skype, Sequoia Capital (original investor in Google), and Index Ventures (original investor in Skype). FON is based in Spain and announced their U.S. launch at ETel just a few weeks ago, and has only existed as a company for 3 short months. Their plan is to create a global shared network of WiFi hotspots, with two levels of users: “Linuses”, who share their own WiFi connection with other FON users for free and can in turn use any other FON node also for free; and “Bills”, who allow others to use their FON nodes for a fee and take a cut for themselves (but don’t get free access to other FON nodes).

It’s an ambitious and probably idealistic business model to say the least (but hey, at least they seem to have one), and many observers have already questioned the viability of FON’s plans to create a large peer-to-peer WiFi network. The two most obvious issues are that, in the U.S. at least, turning your WiFi access point into a for-pay shared service almost certainly goes against most users’ ISP Terms of Service, and the short range of today’s access points makes the idea of stringing these FON nodes together into any kind of meaningful coverage scenario pretty unlikely. There’s also the fact that many users won’t be comfortable or adept at flashing the ROM on their wireless routers to enable them for FON’s system. (I expect FON will quickly start flooding the market with their own inexpensive, already-enabled APs to get around that though). But I do think the first two concerns are major ones, and unless FON is successful at negotiating the deals they are supposedly working on with the major ISPs to allow the FON service to operate on their networks, it’s hard to envision this going anywhere.

As Telopocalypse pointed out, FON definitely has some enthusiasm on their side though (the FON announcement at ETel was a rousing and infectuous pitch), and getting financial support from players like Google and Skype has got people standing up and taking notice. They also have some intriguing and impressive board members, including Ester Dyson and Dan Gillmore (who were joined this weekend by representatives from Skype, Index Ventures, and Cisco.) The idea of creating a ubiquitous global shared WiFi network by encouraging broadband subscribers to share their connections certainly has some rebel appeal, and FON is trying hard to capitalize on that as their communications and branding all have a very revolutionary feel. And let’s not forget you don’t have to look back very far to see other examples of P2P that have taken off far beyond anyone’s initial expectations. Also with Google’s rumored intentions of building out their own network, this play could potentially catapult what seemed like a pretty crazy idea at first into a serious WiFi deployment. As FON’s Martin Varsavsky points out, the 3G guys aren’t going to like this idea one bit.

There are several excellent analyses of FON popping up online now, and for more reading I’d reccomend Om Malik (who interviewed Varsavsky and also has input from wireless guru Glenn Fleishman who has been decidely negative on FON since their inception), Mark Evans, and IP Democracy.

UPDATE: Glenn Fleishman has just posted a statement from Speakeasy, the one U.S. ISP that FON has been trumpeting is on board with their plans, saying they have no relationship or agreement with FON at this point. The plot thickens.

Makezine found another guy building a Skype payphone. This fellow was especially thrifty, getting his payphone for 2 six packs of Pepsi. Speaking of modded payphones, Brad Templeton brought his VoIP/WiFi payphone that he sets up at Burning Man to last month’s ETel conference for folks to play with, and Phillip Torrone has a video of his own Skype payphone in action. If this stuff tickles your fancy, there’s quite a few payphones on ebay.

Voipster released their OpenZoep client-side VoIP engine as an open souce project licensed under the GPL at ETel, and they also released an OpenZoep Firefox extension. Read all about the OpenZoep project and the technology behind it in this new article by Erik van Eykelen. Erik details the APIs and provides resources for those who want to work with OpenZoep. (And if like me you’d been wondering about the pronunciation, Erik helps us out with that too — it’s like “open soup”).

President Bush announced today that he’s nominating telecommunications lawyer Robert McDowell for the final vacant seat on the Federal Communications Commission. This was not an unexpected move, and it tips the commision into a Republican majority, but probably more interesting than McDowell’s political affiliation are his business ones. Since 1999 he’s worked for Comptel, “a trade association that lobbies primarily for communications companies that compete against the “big Bell” companies,” according to the CNET report. It has been widely reported that McDowell is no friend to the telcos, and his nomination may signal some changes in the normally warm and fuzzy relationships the incumbent carriers have had with the FCC. IP Democracy notes that McDowell works for a former chief aid to the powerful Commerce Committe Chairman Stevens, which has the worried telcos feeling a little gunshy:

McDowell’s nomination (rumored for weeks to be imminent) allegedly doesn’t sit well with the big incumbent telcos. Phone company execs fear that McDowell’s sympathies with their rivals will tilt the FCC toward more pro-competition policies in the telco sectors. But, McDowell works for Earl Comstock, a former chief aide to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) so the telcos are afraid to make a fuss.

I saw GTalkr for the first time at the recent Emerging Telephony conference, and while I was impressed with its slick use of Flash, I didn’t see much of a need for a flash-based interface to Gmail or Google Talk. Well, today Michael Arrington points out that GTalkr has just added some features that definitely make the product more interesting to me. I’m glad to see them open up an API to allow others to use and extend the GTalkr functionality, by providing access to Google Talk contact info (including presence), GTalkr notification intergration, and drag and drop support. I think this is a smart move that could help bring more attention to GTalkr and lead to some interesting applications. They’ve also implemented Flickr (and YouTube) integration, which is actually pretty nifty. It’s still not my primary Gmail/Google Talk interface, but I’m definitely going to play around with it some more.

As the Net Neutrality war continues to heat up, Business Week reports today that Verizon’s latest filing with the FCC includes information that shows they intend to keep as much as 80% of their network backbone for their own future IPTV services.

Documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that Verizon Communications (VZ) is setting aside a wide lane on its fiber-optic network for delivering its own television service. According to Marvin Sirbu, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who examined the documents, more than 80% of Verizon’s current capacity is earmarked for carrying its service, while all other traffic jostles in the remainder.

Confirming many observers suspicions that the tiered-Internet plans of the access providers are really about the upcoming battles for IPTV, the Business Week article also noted that the large content providers who are potentially being faced with new, stiff fees from the carriers for the delivery of their bits in a timely fashion are gearing up for the impending legislative struggle.

On Feb. 7 the Net companies plan to take their complaints about Verizon’s plans to the Senate during a hearing on telecom reform. “The Bells have designed a broadband system that squeezes out the public Internet in favor of services or content they want to provide,” says Paul Misener, vice-president for global policy at Amazon.com.

This fight is far from over, but the carriers would seem to have a distinct advantage today with an apparently sympathetic FCC, armies of lawyers, and decades more lobbying experience on Capital Hill.

Techdirt has been following the Net Neutrality debate closely, and does a great job of reminding us how the carriers have fallen down flat on their promises of fiber connections to the home, as well as about all the regulatory privledges and rate increase concessions they were given to implement their fiber networks. Fiber networks which now they apparently want to keep for themselves to be able to serve up their own IPTV services.

Voice over IP has been hyped as a breakthrough technology for at least ten years now. According to the hype, VoIP will make the telephone network obsolete, and that soon, every telephone call will be free. People were saying the same things ten years ago. This utopian world where every call is free is an alluring idea, but it will never happen. Here’s why…

At least it’s for a good cause. New Scientist is reporting that 20 pigeons will be outfitted with tiny backbacks containing GPS receivers, pollution monitoring equipment, and little cell phones in an attempt to measure pollution levels. The plan is for the gear the pigeons are carrying to automatically send SMS messages with the pollution level info back to a blog in real time.

“We are combining an air pollution sensor with a home-made cellphone,” says interdisciplinary artist and researcher Beatriz da Costa of the University of California, Irvine, who came up with the idea of the pigeon blog with her students Cina Hazegh and Kevin Ponto. The team has built a prototype of the pigeons’ kit containing a cellphone circuit board with SIM card and communication chips, a GPS receiver and carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide sensors. They now plan to squeeze all the components onto a single board small enough for the birds to carry in a back pack.

Part study, part art project, the pigeons are to be released during the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts’ annual symposium in San Jose, California on August 5th. The pollution data will be displayed on the blog in the form of an interactive map, and the birds will even be equipped with little cameras around their necks to attempt to post aerial photos to the blog.

Andrew Sheppard opines that the battle between VoIP and PSTN/POTS is over, and the battle for mobile telephony is about to begin. Andrew explains why he thinks the telcos are poised to fail and that mobility is the killer app for VoIP in The Next Battleground for VoIP. Andrew is the author of O’Reilly’s recently-released Skype Hacks.

Speaking as someone who lives a bit out in the boonies where the cellular signals are very hit and miss and not at all reliable, I’d love to see the mashup that David Isenberg proposes of layering cellular dead zones over Google Maps. Living where I do, coverage is the one and only factor I can consider with regards to my cellular provider and I agree that this information is not at all easy to come by. Great idea, David!

Ringtones are a big business these days, a really big business, and we’re going to keep hearing annoucements like the recent Skype/Warner Music Group deal for awhile I expect. Many others have already commented on the illogical business model behind selling 30 second snippets of songs for more than the whole song costs (the Warner/Skype ringtones will go for $1.50 each, though there are lots of rumors that this deal is about more than audio snippets, and we may be seeing music videos being offered up to Skype users soon as part of this arrangement).

But not everyone is happy to plunk down their hard-earned cash for a ringtone, and a new project out of the MIT Media Lab will appeal to those who would like a crack at making their own. Wired is reporting that the new Hyperscore ringtone composition program is available for a free download, and will be included in the widely-touted MIT $100 laptop, which is to be handed out to thousands of school kids around the world next year. (Currently there is only a Windows version, but Mac and Linux versions are coming soon). The article highlights a recent ringtone composing competition using Hyperscore, that had U2’s the Edge as one of the judges.

I’m not sure I agree with Edge’s comment from the Wired article that “Ringtones are a legitimate branch of pop music…” but I’m happy to see some free alternatives cropping up in the ringtone arena.